1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a semiconductor device, a method for fabricating the same, and an electronic apparatus.
2. Description of Related Art
In the microminiaturization of semiconductor devices, a bare chip mounting arrangement is regarded as an ideal form of assembly. However, since quality assurance and the handling of a bare chip are difficult in practice, the chip is assembled in a package during semiconductor device fabrication. As one of the package forms meeting the need for high pin counts, a ball grid array (BGA) type package has been developed recently. On a substrate of the BGA type package, external terminal bumps are arranged in an area array to permit surface mounting.
As one kind of BGA type package, a tape ball grid array (T-BGA) package in which a flexible substrate (film carrier tape) is used as a base in fabrication with a tape automated bonding (TAB) technique has been used. Using the advantageous features of the film carrier tape, a T-BGA packaging technique can provide fine-pitch, high-pin-count semiconductor devices.
Since the film carrier tape is liable to warp due to lack of rigidity, however, attaching a reinforcing sheet (stiffener) is required. In the process of semiconductor device fabrication, a stiffener is attached to an individual piece of film carrier tape punched out after each semiconductor chip is mounted on the film carrier tape. More particularly, the film carrier tape is punched out into separate pieces, the pieces are inspected, and then the stiffener is attached only to the non-defective pieces with good quality. In this manner, production yields can be increased since defective pieces of film are rejected prior to attaining the finished product.
After this process, individual pieces of film must be handled in subsequent steps such as bump formation, resulting in trouble in fabrication.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to obviate the above-mentioned drawback by providing a method of fabrication T-BGA packages which are suitable for mass-production and easy to handle, a semiconductor device fabricated by this method, and an electronic apparatus containing the semiconductor device thus fabricated.